ArtistSwedish
August Strindberg
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August Strindberg took up painting the way a diarist picks up a pen during a crisis - in concentrated bursts when life had become impossible to simply endure. He painted seriously in three distinct periods: the early 1870s, then a crucial phase between 1892 and 1894 when he was living in Germany, Austria, and Denmark and the theatrical world had largely turned against him, and finally for several years after 1900. The roughly 117 paintings that resulted are now considered among the most original works produced in Scandinavia in the nineteenth century.
What makes the paintings unusual for their time is that they push past observation toward something more like psychological weather. The seascapes in particular - heaving grey waters, broken surf, heavy skies over the Stockholm archipelago - register states of mind as much as topography. Strindberg himself articulated a theory of art that gave formal standing to this approach. In an 1894 essay, "Chance in Artistic Creation", he argued that the painter should imitate nature's own creative process, letting forms emerge from the material response of paint rather than imposing a predetermined image. He arrived at this position independently of the movements that would later name similar ideas - his work prefigures both Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism by a generation.
During the same years he was developing his painting theory, Strindberg was also conducting photographic experiments. He placed photosensitive plates directly on the ground to capture the night sky without a camera - images he called celestographs. The results were in fact chemigrams, the accidental product of chemicals and dust, but Strindberg believed he had photographed the stars. The confusion is instructive: his entire visual practice was built on collapsing the distance between the material world and the psychic state of the person confronting it.
His friendships with Edvard Munch and Paul Gauguin placed him at the edge of what was then the most radical visual thinking in Europe, though his paintings never quite belong to any school. Munch drew a portrait of him in 1892, the year they met in Berlin. The two men were temperamentally close - both driven by a conviction that art could make inner states visible. Strindberg's work is held in Nationalmuseum, the Nordic Museum, and the Thielska Galleriet in Stockholm. The Strindbergsmuseet at Drottninggatan 85, in the building he called Blå tornet (the Blue Tower), where he spent his final years, holds archives and paintings. Major retrospectives were mounted at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris in 2001-2002 and at Tate Modern in London in 2005.
On the auction market, Strindberg's paintings command some of the highest prices recorded for any Swedish artist. "Inferno" (1901), painted in Stockholm during a period of acute personal collapse after his break with his third wife Harriet Bosse, sold at Bukowskis in 2017 for 18,575,000 SEK. The works tracked on Auctionist are primarily books, manuscripts, letters, and ephemera rather than paintings - the original canvases are rare and now live mostly in institutions or major private collections - reflecting a market in which any authentic piece of Strindberg material carries historical weight well beyond its physical form.